How PingParty works

PingParty watches public signal sources to detect Internet Service Provider outages affecting Ontario, with a geographic focus on York Region, Barrie, and Oakville.

The six signal layers

• Cloudflare Radar — confirmed national outages. Authoritative but rare.
• Reddit · Local — community subreddits (r/newmarket, r/oakville, r/BarrieOntario).
• Reddit · ISP — provider subreddits (r/Rogers, r/Bell, r/Telus).
• Bluesky — real-time post search. Fastest signal, smaller pool.
• X (Twitter) — high-volume posts, cached 30 minutes, capped at 50 calls/day (~$5/month max).
• Hacker News — only fires for outages significant enough for tech press coverage.

How alerts are triggered

An alert email fires only when two or more independent layers show signal for the same ISP at the same time. A single Reddit complaint is noise. Cloudflare Radar plus Reddit ISP plus X all lighting up at once is signal.

Once fired, the same correlation won't email again for 6 hours.

Geographic emphasis

Posts mentioning York Region, Newmarket, Aurora, Markham, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Oakville, Burlington, Milton, Halton, Barrie, Innisfil, or Simcoe are flagged purple and counted in a separate "Geo" column.

What this dashboard cannot do

• It cannot tell you whether your connection is down — only that other people are reporting issues.
• Per-neighbourhood ISP attribution isn't possible from public sources alone.
• Most of the time the dashboard will show mostly zeros and "Quiet" status — that's normal.
• The X layer is cost-controlled and silent if the daily 50-call budget is exceeded.

Privacy

Subscriber emails are stored only to deliver alerts. Nothing else. Unsubscribe link in every email.